School of Education News

UW-Madison alumni Todd Anderson and Bruce Crownover are receiving national attention for their groundbreaking work capturing disappearing glaciers through art.

Crownover

Anderson, an art professor at Clemson University, received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Education’s Art Department in 1997. Crownover received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Art Department in 1989 and today is a master printer with UW-Madison’s Tandem Press.

Anderson and Crownover, along with Ian van Coller, recently finished a project called “The Last Glacier,” in which the artists worked on capturing the glaciers in Glacier National Park. The project is a collaboration of two different mediums of art: Anderson and Crownover both as printmakers; and van Coller as photographer.

The resulting work is a collection of 15 specially bound books full of all original artwork. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Library of Congress and our very own University of Wisconsin-Madison, among others, have already invested in the work.

Over the past 100 years, since Glacier National Park’s founding, the park has lost more than 80 percent of its glaciers. This artwork helps reach people and spread the message about the world’s changing landscape due to climate change and shows what is at stake through the glaciers’ beauty.

Anderson

An article titled “Thin Ice” quotes Anderson: “It’s just as important when future generations who go to museums and get to see this work. It’s not just saying, 'Oh, there used to be a glacier here,' but it’s also saying, 'This is a little bit about us. In a very, very small way. Of what we valued as a society and what we thought about, the challenges we were trying to face and engage.' ”

The collaborators are now finishing a second project; documenting glaciers in Rocky Mountain National Park.